Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

do we do about that … craft?” He pulled down another display, checking the ship’s library. “The only vessel ever encountered even remotely similar to this one was in 2392, at 9 Ceti. The Turusch call them …” He hesitated at the awkward, difficult name. “Heh-rul-kah.”

      “An enemy?”

      “A single ship wiped out a small Confederation battlefleet.”

      “That thing is two kilometers wide,” Reeves said, shaking his head. “Too big for us. I suggest we follow it, perhaps try to get a closer look … but take no action.”

      “I fear you are right,” Liu said. He was reluctant to agree with the liaison officer, but the Qianfang Fangyu measured just 512 meters from mushroom prow to plasma drive venturis, and massed 9,300 tons. Unlike many of the Guard’s older, Marshall-class destroyers, she still had a primary ranged weapon—a spinal-mount mass driver—but that would be of little use in combat against something as massive as a H’rulka vessel 20 million kilometers away.

      “Captain!” his radar officer called in Guānhuà over his internal link. “The intruder is accelerating rapidly!”

      Liu could see that for himself, as numbers on the display sidebar rapidly changed. The massive vessel was rapidly moving out of Saturn space.

      It was moving sunward, toward the inner system.

      “Helm!” Liu snapped. “Engage gravitics, five hundred gravities. Pursue the intruder!”

      It would be like a mouse pursuing an ox. A dangerous ox. Liu wasn’t exactly sure what the Qianfang Fangyu could do if it actually caught the intruder, but they needed to pace it.

      And to see to it that Earth was warned as quickly as possible.

      But his oath as a High Guard officer—and his determination to see the ancient Middle Kingdom cleansed once and for all of the shame of the Wormwood Strike—made that pursuit imperative, no matter what the outcome.

      The Qianfang Fangyu broke free from Titan orbit, accelerating toward a sun made tiny by distance.

       Palisades Eudaimonium

       New York State, Earth

       1925 hours, EST

      Admiral Koenig looked at Carruthers with surprise. “They’re doing what?”

      “I know,” Carruthers said. “But the Senate majority feels that we don’t have a viable alternative.”

      “But we do. Operation Crown Arrow.”

      Carruthers gave a grim smile. “Not all of them see it that way. Especially if it turns out that these H’rulka are involved. They don’t wish to leave Earth open to attack. Not again.”

      They were standing in a small temporary alcove within the concourse bowl. Carruthers and several of his aides, along with Rand Buchanan, Koenig’s flag captain, had retreated to the relative privacy and soundproof isolation of the alcove as the party outside continued to throb into high gear. Carruthers had asked Koenig to join them there. He’d ordered a martini from the local assembler, and was sipping it in an attempt to rid himself of the bitter taste of his electronic doppelganger’s speech earlier.

      “But a special AI designed to negotiate with the Turusch? We’ve had Turusch POWs on Luna for two months now, and communicating with them is still a problem. What makes the Senate think we can pull off something like that?”

      “I suppose,” Carruthers said slowly, “that they see it as an alternative to extermination.”

      “The Sh’daar Ultimatum,” Koenig said, looking at his drink, “as delivered by their Agletsch toadies, made it pretty clear what the enemy wants of us. An absolute freeze on all technological development, especially GRIN technologies … and a limit to our expansion to other, new systems. Too high a price.”

      “The Sh’daar Ultimatum was … what?” Carruthers said. “Thirty-seven years ago? And we’ve been steadily losing the war ever since it started. The Peace Faction is beginning to think that the price of admission may not be too high after all.”

      “The Senate,” one of Carruthers’ aides put in, “is afraid.” Her name, Koenig could see from her id, was Diane Gregory, and she was a Navy captain. “The enemy got entirely too close to Earth last October,” she continued, “and the Peace Faction feels that it is only a matter of time before they succeed in an all-out attack on Earth’s technical infrastructure.”

      No one was sure why the mysterious Sh’daar—the presumed overlords of an interstellar empire in toward the galactic core—had insisted that Humankind give up its love affair with a steadily and rapidly increasing technology. The presumption, of course, was that there were weapons just around the technological corner that might pose a threat even to the unseen masters of the galaxy, that the Sh’daar, through their subject races, were putting a cap on the technologies of emerging species in order to preserve their place at the top of the interstellar hierarchy.

      But like so very much else about the Sh’daar, that was just a guess. So far as was known, no human had ever seen a Sh’daar; some human xenosophontologists had even suggested that they were a fiction, a kind of philosophical rallying point for diverse species like the Turusch, the Agletsch, the Nungiirtok, and the H’rulka.

      But that, too, was just a theory … and not, in Koenig’s estimation, even a particularly likely one.

      And not even the super-weapon idea managed to explain the Sh’daar concern with human science, specifically with genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the so-called GRIN technologies. GRIN had been the driving forces of human technical progress for four centuries, now, so much so that in many ways they defined human culture, technology, and economic growth. That was why it had been unthinkable, at least to the Confederation leaders of thirty-seven years ago, that Humankind surrender its fascination with those particular technologies.

      It was difficult to imagine a weapon system relying on all four technologies that might pose a threat to godlike aliens inhabiting some remote corner of the galaxy. Nanotechnology? Absolutely. Robotics? Possibly, but not very likely. Genetics? Again, possibly … though what kind of biological weapon could threaten a species that itself must long ago have mastered the most intimate secrets of biology? Information, computer, and communications technologies? Certainly a necessity, at least for controlling such a hypothetical super-weapon.

      But … why those four? Why not another “G”—gravitics? Projected singularities made possible both inertia-free acceleration and the space-bending Alcubierre Drive, which reduced a 4.3-year voyage to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light to something just less than two and a half days. Being able to make micro black holes to order might well lead to some interesting weapons systems one day.

      Or how about adding an “E” for energy? Artificial black holes within a starship’s quantum-tap power plant extracted seemingly unlimited amounts of raw energy from the vacuum fluctuation of the zero-point field. If it could be harnessed, that kind of energy release could almost certainly be developed somehow into a truly nasty super-weapon.

      No, there was something specific about GRIN technologies that the Sh’daar didn’t like, that they feared. But what?

      Koenig had always opted for the super-weapon theory. Think-tank study groups, he knew, had been working on that angle ever since the Sh’daar Ultimatum had been delivered, but with no solid leads so far. The notion that advanced technologies a century or two hence might enable humans to snuff out a star or transform the nature of reality itself would remain sheer fantasy until some idea could be developed showing where GRIN was taking the human species. The exact nature of the innovative leaps, the inventions, the unexpected technological advances of even the next fifty years simply could not be anticipated.

      There was no way, even with the most powerful virtual simulations, to predict what was going to be discovered, and when.

      “So … tell